When the 12 founding members signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington DC on 4th April 1949, no-one could imagine that they were present at the creation of the most successful politico-military alliance in modern history. What they initially agreed upon was an institutionalized conference of member states, which was developed only step by step into an international organization with powerful military capability. Today, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) consists of 28 member states, and more are awaiting admission. It conducts military operations on three continents and has institutionalized partnerships with some 20 countries and very close relations with key democracies outside Europe, such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Given this amazing evolution, the challenge lies in the question of how to structure NATO’s history over the last 60 years. One possibility is to take NATO’s disputes and crises throughout the decades as a guiding principle. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty – also called the Washington Treaty – was signed as the Soviet Union continued to impose the Berlin Blockade. At the same time, many Alliance partners had serious reservations about the newly emerging Federal Republic of Germany. The year 1959 was marked by continuing Soviet pressure concerning the status of Berlin. In 1969, international protests against the war in Vietnam dominated the scene. A year before, NATO had passively witnessed the crushing of democratic tendencies in Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces. Some Europeans considered as weakness NATO’s lack of action. In 1979, Alliance members took the ‘Dual-Track Decision’ (also known as the Double-Track Decision) to cope with the emerging threat posed by Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles in Europe. This was the prelude to one of NATO’s most severe crises, which took the Alliance close to breaking up in the early 1980s.

Even after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the ‘victory’ of NATO in the Cold War, disputes seemed to be the guiding element in the Alliance’s history. NATO enlargement, the crisis in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq are catchwords that all stand for heavy transatlantic or intra-European clashes repeatedly putting a strain on NATO’s cohesion. […]

OUTLINE

• NATO’s phases
• Phase 1: Four decades of self-assertion and self-defense
• Phase 2: NATO as the “Midwife of Change”
• Phase 3: NATO after 9/11
• Problems at the Age of 60

Karl-Heinz Kamp is Research Division Director at the NATO Defense College, Rome. Previously he worked for a long time as security policy coordinator at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin. He has also been seconded to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has taught political science at the University of Cologne.